This Is What Happens When You Combine Spaghetti with Ice Cream

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This Is What Happens When You Combine Spaghetti with Ice Cream

The German novelty dessert of “Spaghetti Eis” is made by topping cream with strands of noodle-like ice cream and a strawberry “Bolognese” sauce.

"Before we start, I have to say: you don't get this in Italy," says Gianluca, the unfeasibly tall, almost unbearably handsome man from Berlin's Eis Lanzarno ice cream and coffee shop.

No kidding. I've tipped up, on this sultry and thunderous evening, just over the road from the bongos and cigarette butts of Gorlitzer Park, to learn how to make the spectacularly German novelty dish: Spaghetti Eis.

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It's hardly surprising to hear that Spaghetti Eis was invented in Germany. You make it with a potato masher, for Christ's sake. It could only really get more German if you served the whole thing on a sausage.

The Spaghetti Eis—or "Spaghetti Ice" to our post-Brexit friends—was invented, according to legend, in the 1960s in Mannheim by the chef Dario Fontanella, and has been a German novelty ever since. I discovered the dish one sticky Berlin evening as my sugar-fueled boyfriend got that peculiar, misty glint in his eye that tells me he is about to do something either spectacular, or spectacularly stupid.

Gianluca of Berlin ice cream and coffee shop Eis Lanzarno, who specialise in Spaghetti Eis. All photos by the author.

"I'm going to order a Spaghetti Ice," he said, staring lovingly at the glowing board above Lanzarno's counter. And so, my friends, I met the Spaghetti Eis.

"The whole things starts with the cream," explains Gianluca, piling a Vesuvian mound of cold, squirty cream into the middle of my paper bowl. "This is what makes the thing work."

I'll say. Eis Lanzarno has been on the same site, with the same machines, the same ethos, and much of the same decor since 1983. For the first six years of business, this enclave of excellent coffee and homemade ice cream existed under the Berlin Wall.

Suddenly, 1983 seems a long time ago. And yet, laughs Gianluca, it works. Their small selection of ice cream, churned and made just the other side of a plate glass wall behind me, is delicious. There's almost no need to fuck with it.

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And yet, thank God, they do. So we have the Spaghetti Eis.

"You put the ice cream in this," says Gianluca, holding up a stainless steel cylinder with holes across the bottom. It looks like a potato ricer. In fact, it was inspired by the potato ricer. That's certainly how Germans attempt to make Spaghetti Ice at home.

Luckily, Gianluca has a special machine.

"It's quite old, probably been around since the 1970s," he says, patting it affectionately.

spaghetti-ice-berlin

We spoon four dollops of delicious vanilla ice cream into the cylinder, before pushing it up into the machine like a barista locking in a puck of freshly-ground coffee. Then, quick as a flash, pushes a button and about fifty strands of perfectly pressed, noodle-like ice cream stream out of the holes in the bottom, all over my mound of cream. I honk with laughter. There is something vaguely indecent, vaguely cartoonish about this wig of creamy noodle draped across the bowl. And yet, this is our spaghetti.

"Then, we add the sauce," says Gianluca, grabbing a stainless steel tub out of the fridge. "This is actually really good sauce."

He's not wrong. The jam-like concentrate of strawberries is still fresh fruit-sharp, with little seeds running through like pearls. It is, of course, supposed to look like Bolognese sauce. It does, a bit. If you squint. Or are a little distracted, looking up at a man born just a few miles out of Bologna who, at that very moment, is ladling strawberry sauce onto a bowl of comedy ice noodles 20 centimetres from your left hand.

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To this we add, finally, a sprinkling of Parmesan. I'm joking. That would be fucking insane. No, to this trompe l'oeil of a pudding masterpiece we add a healthy scattering of white chocolate.

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"You eat this," says Gianluca, pushing the dish towards me with one of those slow, Italian looks that make you sort of wish you looked more like Monica Bellucci and less, as I do, like a cocker spaniel in sports shorts.

But then again, that is sort of the point of the Spaghetti Eis—it is to actual spaghetti what the cocker spaniel is to the wolf: charming, sweet, vaguely ridiculous. It is also, as Europe dances along the blade of disharmony, an edible reminder of what wonderful things can happen when we look to our neighbours for inspiration. Of what wonderful things can happen in Europe.

Gianluca with his finished Spaghetti Eis.

So, well done Germany. And, in a roundabout way, well done Italy. But most of all: well done me, for eating the entire thing in less time than it takes to say kartoffle spätzle.